A lot of text in Fez is encoded, including text from a number of NPCs. I'd assumed that you have to do something in-game to unlock the translation, but I haven't come across anything of the sort yet. Is there a Rosetta Stone-style resource in the game, or is the player actually intended to use cryptographic methods to solve the substitution?

Note that I'm not asking for a translation resource. I want to solve this puzzle myself, but I'd like to know if I actually should have been copying the tiny text from all those NPCs I encountered.

2 Answers
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There is one room in particular that provides what you're looking for. You don't need to copy NPC dialog, though part of the fun is copying the other wall-writings for later consideration. So there is no single intended method (I imagine most people will look online)—your method could work, though it sounds frustrating.

Want a hint for that room's location?

It's off of the waterfall room.

Want an even bigger hint?

A pillar in the room links the code to an English pangram (sentence containing every letter of the alphabet).

I have actually read somewhere that somebody went through and used cryptography to figure it out. I can't imagine doing that myself... EDIT: I just read the answer under this, I have to respect determination like that.
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The UglyDec 5 '13 at 21:04

Eventually you get access to large amounts of text in the language code, which allowed me to work out the code using the normal approach you'd use for a substitution cipher -- spot frequently used symbols and repeated patterns, guess at the vowels and common words,build from there.

Later, I found a "rosetta stone" in the form of a pangram written alongside the thing it described.